An Interesting Use For Twitter

I am sure the SC readers are well aware of the microblogging service known as Twitter. The hype has grown tremendously since I first signed up late last year and it certainly seems to be almost mainstream now.

How Do I Use Twitter?

When I first signed up I wasn’t sure how useful it would be but I knew that the usefulness of the tool was totally dependent on who you chose to follow. I focused on news (CNN Breaking News, The Economist, GigaOm and more) as well as some business personalities like the CEO of Zappos.com and online marketing practitioners. I eventually added some friends and musicians.

The main problem is that I don’t like checking Twitter (or my email) constantly throughout the day and the more people I followed, the more posts I actually missed - reducing the usefulness of the tool. Now I don’t automatically follow everyone that follows me, just like how I don’t accept every friend request on Facebook.

The main things I post are links to interesting articles and/or blog posts I read. The key is that they are interesting to me, ranging from finance to technology. I also post motivational quotes once in a while.

But…this is not much different than what I already do on Facebook and Facebook makes it far easier for my contacts to find my posted items and to comment. So what is the benefit of Twitter?

With Twitter I can be exposed to content from people that I am NOT connected to on Facebook and I can also use the search feature to see what people are saying about specific topics.

This week I used Twitter in a new way: I signed up for webinar on using web 2.0 to build loyalty and they encouraged us to post on twitter in real-time using a hash tag (eg. #apple) and then search using that tag to see what other people checking out the webinar were saying.

It worked great: I was introduced to some new websites thanks to tweets by others, saw the kinds of questions that were on the minds of people, read critiques and alternative suggestions, shared some links with someone to answer their question and had a discussion with a participant.

These are people I normally would not interact with on a webinar because few people ever actually ask questions during the Q/A section of webinars and I wouldn’t talk to them unless I was the host or guest speaker.

It added a new level of interactivity to the webinar and made it feel more like a classroom where we all could contribute. Web 2.0 is supposed to be all about multiple communication lines, no longer the one-way communication of old and leveraging Twitter during a webinar certainly leads to greater interactivity.

This hash tag search functionality makes it extremely easy to find people with similar interests. Try it out and see if you find interesting people to follow and interact with for the topics that interest you.

Follow me at twitter.com/davidmullings